Look, better for ONE of my sites is a barebones bb. Better for the other is Invision. It has to do with what you, as an admin, want to support, what kind of users you have, what you need to integrate your site with, etc etc etc.

In short: Any answer you get will be based on the specific individual needs.

You’re never going to get a definitive answer. Instead, you need to ask a better question: “What features do you feel are important in forum software?” Then you get a list of the default features in each board software and list them all.

From THAT, you can make a breakdown of ‘Who handles which plugin better?’ and have multi-choice.

Which would kind of be a cool app to help people pick the right forum software, but it still rolls back to ‘what’s right for you?’

A good role manager would be awesome. Right now I have to create a new plugin every time I create a new Role… kind of a pain.

If someone took the existing PM code and then refactored it and removed security holes… that would be huge. It’d be particularly awesome if it used the same database model, so the old PM’s were still readable! I’ve heard BuddyPress is working on a PM plugin, so I was considering just switching over to that (if I could use it without installing BuddyPress).

The Avatars plugin out there is hard to configure (there are at least 3 separate files you have to install in different places), and it dumps all avatars in a single folder (not sure if that scales). It’d be fantastic if someone could clean that up.

Fundamentally, bbPress needs better user account management. Users can’t easily reset their passwords or look up their usernames… and there’s no ability to change or delete your own username. Those would be huge additions.

Other than changing and deleting their own username, those are all great ideas! Changing usernames messes up lots of code, and deleting your own account?!

The Role Manager has been submitted to the bbPress Plugin Repository – in some future version, it will have 0.9 compatibility (if 1.0 isn’t released first).

The BuddyPress PM plugin is for WordPress MU, not bbPress, so you’d be switching over from a forum to a blog hosting social network. The existing PM plugin probably needs to be scrapped — it would be easier to start over (for me, at least), but importing the old data would help everyone that had Private Messaging installed.

The avatars plugin (in my opinion) is doing the right thing the wrong way. By making the plugin a “real plugin” (no editing core files, no putting files into other directories) and splitting the avatars into separate folders, the plugin would be a lot better.

I guess for the username/password stuff, I’m just mentioning what we get emails from our users about. We get requests almost every day from users who forgot their username or want to reset their password.

Rather than deleting the account, maybe a username shutdown would be a good compromise? The account would have signin disabled, and the profile would show “this username has been shut down”. Old comments from that user would still appear on the site, and link to the “shut down” profile page.

I guess for the username/password stuff, I’m just mentioning what we get emails from our users about. We get requests almost every day from users who forgot their username or want to reset their password.

Rather than deleting the account, maybe a username shutdown would be a good compromise? The account would have signin disabled, and the profile would show “this username has been shut down”. Old comments from that user would still appear on the site, and link to the “shut down” profile page.